Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRANSCLASS (Transnational meanings and makings of class: Polish labour, capital and the state)
Reporting period: 2017-12-01 to 2019-11-30
This research has grown out of the conviction that transnationally and culturally sensitive investigations of class transformations can help us to better understand economic situation and power struggles that emerge under global capitalism, and to further political possibilities for a more just and equal European society, one which is open to transnational mobility, rather than one which normalizes national boundaries and stasis.
Posted work is a rapidly growing type of European mobility (which saw a 44% increase between 2012 and 2014), amounting to 1.93 million workers. Poland posts between 220,000 and 605,000 workers annually, with figures varying depending on the mode of calculation of the Portable Document A1, which legitimizes workers’ posted status. I view posted work as an emblematic context through which transnational complexities of class transformations, and the conflicting interests which mark the project of European integration, might be studied and theorized.
Posting is regulated by the national implementation of two transnational European policies: the Posted Workers Directive (96/71/EC and 2014/67/EU) and the Regulation on the Coordination of the Social Security Systems (883/2004 and 987/2009). They create posting as a legal exception: posted workers do not move as individual migrants, but under the transnational umbrella of their employers. Their mobility generates an institutional split, whereby workers are subjected to the destination country’s superior labour standards, but remain insured and pay taxes (up to 183 days) in the country of origin in which their employer is also located. Because Polish posted workers are institutionally anchored in Poland, their insurance premiums and taxes are lower than in the Western countries of destination. This makes posting an appealing business model for the employers, but is seen as problematic from the destination country’s perspective.
My research indicates that posted work produces a fragmented landscape of class that hierarchizes Polish labour and capital within and across national borders. It brings Polish actors both empowerment and subjugation vis-a-vis each other and their foreign counterparts. Posting presents Polish workers the possibility to renegotiate their subjugated financial status in Poland and the opportunity to contribute to their self-identification as a transnationally skilled workforce that can adopt a middle-class status in Poland, despite living on the social margins of the destination countries. However, the complexity and ambiguity of regulations aids and abets the uncertainty of status and fragmentation. It accentuates the division between those workers who are posted and those who are employed directly with the principle contractor abroad, and is enhanced by the growing division between workers who are posted as employees and those who are self-employed.
Posting allows Polish employers to negotiate their self-identification as a subaltern capital and to gradually ascend to a transnational capitalist class. In contrast to workers, the ambiguity of the regime becomes an underpinning of the emerging class identification of Polish employers because it provides an impetus to host workshops, knowledge exchange and provides the basis for political agency at the European Union level to keep posting regulations less strict than those desired by the Western receiving countries. ’s Western administrations are often conceived of as targeting Polish employers and exploiting the ambiguity in order to push them out of the market. The escape from the subaltern status has its limits, given that Polish employers mostly go abroad as subcontractors and have a limited leverage to negotiate well-paid contracts with Western companies, which also affects their workforce detrimentally vis-à-vis the local workforce.
The Polish state’s involvement in posting is multi-scalar and contradictory. Although the Polish government sees posting as a Polish national interest, its ability to shape posting in a way it considers to be favourable is limited. It did not have significant power in affecting European legislations while the key Polish state player at the level of everyday decision making, namely the Polish Social Insurance Institution and its officials who issue A1 portable documents, are bound by transnational regulations and accountability. The officials view the ambiguity of regulations to be problematic. It engenders their own decision-making to secure the long-term certainty of the A1 document which neither serves workers nor employers’ interests.
I have communicated these results at different conferences and seminars, in academic publications, and through the internet to various targeted audiences, from academics in different disciplines to practitioners.